Spot hippos and explore new islands in Crest update

You’re no longer restricted to controlling a single island in early access god game Crest [official site]: the latest update means your followers can sail off to explore the world around them. If you didn’t know, Crest is a religion simulator in which you can only interact with your subjects by issuing vague commandments in the “if [subject] then [verb] [object]” form. They’re supposed to be ambiguous, and it’s unlikely your people will do want you want them to do. Most likely, they’ll die of starvation, but hey-ho, you can just fire up another procedurally-generated world and start again.

The update, which adds an ‘Exploration Module’, is full of stuff. As well as getting in boats and heading for new shores, your followers can terraform land. Island variety is up (there’s now beaches, cliffs and harbours), and there’s new commandments to try out. Oh, and you’ll now spot hippos in the water, which is surely the biggest addition. Read the full list (which is somewhat vague itself) here.

Here’s the trailer for the update:

I must admit that Crest hasn’t been on my radar, so if you’re in the same position then reading Marsh’s premature evaluation should bring you up to speed with roughly what to expect. The caveat is that he played it back in 2015, so expect the game to have expanded since then.

I like the idea of issuing ambiguous commandments before sitting back and watching how they will play out. Marsh certainly had a few corkers:

“If you’re happy, I say, get metal. Get food. And then if you have loads of food, ‘perform underfed’, by which I mean, feed the needy. And if you’re needy, ‘perform food’. What I don’t say, but what people then in fact do, is eat each other. They just saunter over to a neighbour’s house, pull out a baby and devour it. Cannibalism, in a very literal sense, eats my civilisation from within.

The game is deliberately opaque: developers Eat Create Sleep say the “consequences of your actions may not always be clear”. Ultimately, that’s what turned Marsh off of it. But if you can stomach that, then it might be worth considering.

It’s £7.19/9,89/€9.89 on Steam, including a 10% discount until Monday. The full launch is tentatively slated for the end of this year.